"You convince him to come marry you, move here and have babies. This is where your future should be, if you like him enough for that."

Said Leslie Aberlin, owner of a development called Aberlin Springs, to a "prospective resident, the girlfriend of a local banker."

Aberlin is quoted in "This Ohio Farm Community Is a Mecca for the ‘MAHA Mom’/In a neighborhood that appeals to people from both the right and the left, residents strive for a finely tuned state of political harmony" (NYT)(gift link).

Ms. Aberlin loves that so many “traditional wives,” as she calls stay-at-home moms, are raising their children in her community. While she brought up her two kids as a single mother, divorcing her ex-husband soon after her second baby was born, she calls herself a “boss woman by accident.” She believes women have been “sold a bag of goods” about the importance of a career, and are usually more fulfilled when they focus on their kids full time.

1. What's wrong with buying a bag of goods?  She means sold a bill of goods. With a bag of goods, you've got the goods. They're in the bag. A bill of goods is a document that merely lists the goods. You just bought the piece of paper. 

2. The real estate is real, but what about the mystique of the MAHA Mom? Buying a personal residence always comes with something intangible, the life you imagine for yourself in that house."

3. It's not a house, it's a home — Bob Dylan quote.

4. The home is never in the bag.

I created a new tag this morning and I noticed an old tag that I can never use anymore.

The new tag: Frugality. This morning's post about the "stingy challenge" in Chinese social media pushed me over the line. I went back into the archive and found 10 old posts that deserved the "frugality" tag — Remember the FIRE movement? Voluntary houselessness? "Financial Secrets of the Amish"? Remember when Scott Walker branded himself with Kohl's? Do you care about Sir Jeffery Amherst? Is Mr. Money Mustache still around? Remember me seeing "potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low"? Want to know how frugality links the "Xi jacket" to the "Mao suit"? How Salon tried to make us hate Trump for his cheapness? It's all there, under the "frugality" tag.

The old tag: "Written strangely early in the morning." There's no earliness in the morning that can be strange anymore. I used to think it strange to put up the first post in the 4-o'clock hour, but now, it would only be strange if I put up the first post before midnight, and that wouldn't be "morning" yet — no "a.m." The last post in this once-important tag was January 23, 2022 — "Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading 'Sports.'" — published at 3:10 a.m. Yes, that seemed notably early, 3 years ago. But now, when I wake up, feeling refreshed after what seems like a long sleep, and I look at the iPhone hoping it's not too early — which wouldn't be strange at all — I'm pleased if I see it's at least 3 a.m. Yesterday, when I looked — ready to leap out of bed — it was only 12:35 a.m. There are so many old posts with that tag! Here's the first one, in my first year of blogging, 2004: "Did you see that the first post today has a 4:33 a.m. timestamp? And yesterday's was 5:02? My two-hour 8 a.m. class has completely transformed my biorhythms, apparently. I was already a morning person, but this is a bit eerie. At least the NYT is already here at that hour...." That was 20 years ago, back when "the NYT" referred to a folded paper concoction stuffed in a blue plastic bag.

"What do you do when neither spouse is happy with the working and income-generating grind?"

"My husband and I had an agreement that when each of our children were born, I would take my maternity leave and then he would take a leave of similar length when I returned to work. We are finding now, after the arrival of our second baby, that neither of us wants to go back. I earn more money, and thus I have to return to work, but I am equally unhappy with the weekly grind...."

From a letter to the WaPo advice columnist.

This shows that the perverse privilege inherent in systematically paying women less. It preserves the traditional structure of man out in the world, woman in the home.

What can you say to this woman except welcome to reality? Well, I'd say that it doesn't have to be the higher earner who goes to work. Who has the more satisfying job? Who has the job that makes a greater contribution to the world? Maybe at some point, you'll hit upon the factors that let the wife have her wish of avoiding the difficulties of work.

Also, consider that you might also not be happy with the childcare "grind." It's all grind when you have a bad attitude, isn't it?

"Traditionalists argue that the feminist revolution has gone too far, and we need to get more women back into the home. But I think..."

"... it makes more sense to take the opposite perspective: that the feminist revolution is only half finished. We’ve done a lot to encourage women to pursue careers in traditionally male professions. But we still don’t do enough to encourage men to do traditionally female work in our homes and communities. That’s important not only because it enables their partners to succeed at work, but also because this kind of work is important in its own right."

Writes in Timothy B. Lee in "I'm a professional dad who 'leaned out' to support my wife's career/If we want an equal society, we need to get more comfortable with unequal marriages" (Full Stack Economics).

Lee — one of five Washington Post writers who followed Ezra Klein to Vox Media to help start Vox.com in 2014 — writes from personal experience:

"You don’t have to just be a stay-at-home mom, you can aspire to be a young child-free woman and not work."

"I spend my hours doing what I want and have time to look after my body, cook nice meals and spend quality time with friends."

Says Emily de Rean, 37, who "previously worked as a financial analyst, but now lives off her boyfriend’s money after realizing she was unhappy climbing the corporate ladder," quoted in "I quit my job to be a full-time girlfriend: Get fit, cook and you can too" (NY Post). 

She had already quit her finance job — and switched to being a nanny — when she met this rich boyfriend who "encouraged me to stop working and become a stay-at-home girlfriend, so I could have time to do something more productive."

"Liberalism, she said [in the late 1960s], rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into 'a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live...."

"She argued that the real revolution that allowed women to have careers was not the women’s movement but the availability of modern forms of birth control. To Ms. Decter, women had a biological destiny to be wives and mothers, and those who tried to escape it evinced self-hatred. In her 1972 book, 'The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation,' she wrote that women’s 'true grievance' is not that they are 'mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are — women.' She offered a solution: Single women should remain chaste, because women are naturally monogamous. And withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men...."

From "Midge Decter, an Architect of Neoconservatism, Dies at 94/As a writer and intellectual, she abandoned liberal politics, challenged the women’s movement and championed the Reagan Republican agenda" (NYT). 

I remember reading about Midge Decter for the first time back in 1972 when "The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation" came out. I wish I could find that article now, not just to be able to revisit the reaction to the book, but to see the illustration, which I remember as a sequence of drawings of a woman reading the book calmly, then reading the book with an expression of developing anger, then kicking the book in the air. It neatly conveyed the message: Don't read this book. Midge Decter is toxic.

I did find the contemporaneous review in the NYT, "The argument of Women's Liberation, Midge Decter says, is with liberation" (October 15, 1972). The reviewer, George Stade, an English professor, writes:

"Women’s workforce participation has plummeted. Here’s how to reverse the trend."

 A headline at Fortune.

Excerpt:

[T]he January jobs report found that 275,000 women left the workforce last month, leaving the women’s workplace participation rate at 57%—a rate that pre-pandemic had not been seen since 1988. An entire generation of progress has been erased in two years....

Entrenched gender roles within different-sex couples can push women out of the workforce more readily and make it harder for them to return. A paper by sociologist Jessica Calarco found that different-sex, dual-earner couples grappled with the increased parenting duties of the pandemic in mostly unequal ways, even when that was a reversion from formerly more egalitarian relationships and even when those arrangements negatively affected mothers.

Are you "negatively affected" if you become the home-based partner in a single-earner household? I'd suggest that what's not egalitarian is the assumption that what is conventionally associated with women is negative. Such disrespect for single-earner households makes it even harder for the man to take the home-based position. Why the bias in favor of every adult working outside the home?

The article does go on to some decent discussion of problems women may have in returning to jobs when they do in fact want jobs. My beef is with the assumption that they do want to work outside the home or that they should.

Now that we're capitalizing "Black," why not capitalize "The Suburban Housewives of America"?

The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020

The argument for capitalizing "Black" is that "For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community." Now, think about "The Suburban Housewives of America." Who are these people? Women in the home-based half of a single-earner household — suburban-home-based. Is this a very large group? Is it a group with "a shared sense of identity and community"? Does Trump want to stimulate a feeling of shared identity and community within this set of people? Apparently he wants them to see themselves as a specific and specifically endangered group: Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.

Click through to the link and see how long it takes you to figure out Biden's plot to destroy the suburban housewife dream.

I grew up with the suburban housewife dream, and I think it was destroyed long ago. It might be a good dream, worth restimulating. Let's discuss it. I've discussed it for years under my "single-earner household" tag. But I don't think Biden's vague aspirations about racial diversity in the suburbs are what could destroy what's left of the suburban housewife dream. The dream is eroded and obscured by a culture that encourages everyone to get a job and undervalues the role of the home-based partner in a single-earner household. Ironically, the phrase "suburban housewife" is part of the culture that undermines the single-earner household. It sounds like it's assigned to the woman because of her sex, and it sounds subordinate and dull.

When you read "The Suburban Housewives of America," what was your mental image? Did you picture women living in the present? If you flashed back to some housewife of the past, did she look like a fuzzy-slippered frump in "The Far Side" or like Mary Tyler Moore on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"?

ADDED: Speaking of the grouping of women into a traditional stereotype for political exploitation, there are these "moms":

I recognize a lot of the so-called “moms” as the same antifa women who dressed in black as recent as a couple days ago. They just put on a yellow shirt now for optics. Most of these people aren’t mothers & many don’t even identify as female. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/UPffcao0fv

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 22, 2020

Does everyone have a yellow T-shirt waiting to be pulled out of the laundry?

The return of the single-earner household?

Fascinating. Suggests trial and error favoring specialization efficiencies over diversification strategies.

(I am a member of a dual-career couple, but don't see any particular reason my preferences should be normative). https://t.co/78kCVydfp0

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 14, 2020

The New York Times juxtaposes Elizabeth Warren's dropping out of the presidential race with the vast monetary value of women's "unpaid" labor and the news that the Democratic Party does not yet belong to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The top of the home page looks like this now:



1. You don't need me to tell you that Elizabeth Warren has dropped out. The NYT take: "Though her vision excited progressives, that did not translate to enough excitement from the party’s more working-class and diverse base....  Ms. Warren’s political demise was a death by a thousand cuts, not a dramatic implosion but a steady decline.... She invested heavily in the early states, with a ground game that was the envy of her rivals. But it did not pay off...."

2. We're told, in an opinion piece, "Women’s Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000/If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year." I've seen pieces like this all my life, and I'm impressed but not impressed. We all do many things for ourselves — and maybe for family members — that would be expensive if we had to pay someone else to do it for us. But that doesn't mean there's a way to collect money for it. It's a savings of money. If I walk instead of taking a cab, I save money, but I can't get paid for it. There are graphs showing that everywhere in the world women spend more hours in the day doing unpaid work than men do, but they're counting as work the time women spend with their own children. They are contributing value to the family economic unit, not getting ripped off. The man isn't taking unfair advantage if he's working to get money to contribute to the unit. The issue isn't an imbalance of money, but only whether one is working harder than the other or one is more fulfilled than the other.

3. "Why Democrats Are Still Not the Party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/In contests for party control between progressives and moderates, electoral and governing results speak for themselves" — this is "news analysis" by Jennifer Steinhauer. The "still" implies that it should be AOC's party or that it's only a matter of time before it is. From the text: "[M]any Democrats began to fret early on that the far left was going to do to them what the Tea Party had done to Republicans a few years back: Run them out of town, one primary at a time. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez previously suggested that Democrats who were not sufficiently loyal to an emergent brand of progressive politics should have others like her run against them in a primary. She is now suggesting that, exit polling be damned, Mr. Biden’s latest string of successes is because of the strong-arming of corporate lobbyists...."

Why is this article — "New mothers who took leave in California were less likely to work a decade later than those who didn’t" — illustrated with a photo of a father?

And why is this "A Surprising Finding"? It seems completely unsurprising.

The title on the article page is "A Surprising Finding on Paid Leave: 'This Is Not the Way We Teach This.'" It's surprising mainly because other studies had shown that paid leave would improve the chances that women would return to work. I guess logically you might think that not every parent takes leave and that the ones who would take unpaid leave are those who don't need money so much and might be likely to drop out of the working-for-money way of life. If there's paid leave, you'll get some people who need the money, so paid leave should swell the ranks of the parents-on-leave with people who need to work for money, and they'd be going back to work when the paid leave runs out.

The research looked at California women who took leave before the state required payment during leave and those who took leave after that point. In this large set of cases, women who got paid during parental leave were less likely to return to work.

The new paper is solid and the results plausible, said Maya Rossin-Slater, an economist at Stanford who has researched California’s program extensively. “They have fantastic data and large sample sizes relative to the prior papers, and that’s a big advance,” she said. “This paper cautions us that paid leave is not a silver bullet. There are other policy tools we need to implement.”

A silver bullet?!! Is the woman who chooses to stay home with her children a werewolf?!

[T]he researchers concluded, something about taking paid leave seems to have encouraged mothers to scale back at work and spend more time with their children.

Mothers who took the leave spent more time than those who didn’t reading to children, sharing meals with them and taking them on outings, the researchers found. They also had fewer children, consistent with the style of intensive parenting that entails investing lots of time and money in each child....

Maybe rational women, who respond to the incentive of paid leave, also analyze other aspects of life in economic terms and figure out the value of the work done in the home, the costs of going to work, and the good reasons to institute division of labor within the family, with only one parent engaged in  money-earning outside the home.  Maybe you get some perspective on life and economics when you've got the time to reflect and plan. When you're outside of the workplace, you may develop a sense of the meaning of life that isn't workplace-based? Does the government want that not to happen?!

In the end of the article, we get around to dad:

If the mother — but not the father — is out of work and doing most of the child care at the beginning, the division of labor could get locked in.... Just 15 percent of bonding leave claims in California in 2014 were by men, and the average man took just two or three days off. Men’s employment and earnings did not decline after they had a child.

I guess this is the place where we are not supposed to talk about gender. But if we really believe in gender, why isn't gender the explanation for why women are much more likely to take the home-based role in the division of labor? I've known men — cis-gender men — who've taken the home-based role, and these are men I greatly respect. I'm just saying that if gender has real meaning, then maternal nurturing is the ultimate in things that are not surprising.

Elizabeth Warren's 2004 book "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke" might hurt her with feminists...

... Ezra Klein muses at Vox.

The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

• The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.
• Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.
• Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on....

A certain strand of the American right has long expressed quiet admiration for the book, since its thesis can on some level be boiled down to the idea that feminists were too optimistic about the implications of women’s mass entry into the workforce....

[The book is] a realistic portrayal of the fact that most people have jobs rather than careers and that for most modern mothers, working is less a choice than a practical economic necessity....

[The book suggests] a version of Warren that could be more broadly electorally appealing... Two-Income Trap...  speaks to the questions... as to whether unfettered capitalism is undermining the traditional family....

I'm very interested to see this. It gets my "single-earner household" tag, and you can click on that and see it's a subject that's been important to me for years.

I have 62 posts on that tag, beginning with an April 2012 post, "The Hilary Rosen flap shows the way to a new bipartisanship premised on the value of single-earner households" (Hilary Rosen had mocked Ann Romney for never having "worked a day in her life"). I said:

Would you rather have a wife or be a wife (with "wife" understood as the traditional stay-at-home helpmeet)?

New York Magazine just reprinted "‘I Want a Wife,’ the Timeless ’70s Feminist Manifesto," by Judy (Syfers) Brady:

I want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to the park, the zoo, etc....

I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up.... I want a wife who will care for me when I am sick....

I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life....

I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it....

... I want my wife to quit working and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care of a wife’s duties.

There is only one comment up over there:

I asked a man once if he wanted someone who would do all of these things. He replied with an emphatic 'yes', eyes practically glazed over imagining it. Then I said to him, 'me too.'

Since flipping sex roles is the point of the essay, why didn't the commenter think of flipping her question? The famous old essay is a woman's experimenting with the idea that the man's role in a traditional single-earner household is preferable. I say ask the man: Would you like to do all of these things for a woman you love if that woman did all the outside-of-the-household work and brought home an ample income?

And I note that the famous old essay says nothing about yardwork and car maintenance. I searched the article for "car" and found "care" 10 times, but not one "car." There's nothing about mowing the lawn and gardening. But include all that in the flipped question: How would you like to be the stay-at-home partner in a marriage, dealing with all the tasks that are not the income-producing job that is the full responsibility of the other partner? I'll bet a lot of men would say I'd like it (or I'd only like it if you could assure me other people wouldn't look down on me).

4 other observations:

1. The essay has 2 references to mending clothes. Who spends much if any time mending clothes today? In the old days, clothes were (I believe) much more expensive (in relation to income) than they are today, and women had sewing kits and baskets of "mending" (that is, things that needed mending). It wasn't just sewing buttons back on and closing the occasional burst seam. It was darning socks and stitching on patches. Mending is one aspect of traditional wife-work that's just not anything anymore. There's also much less ironing.

2. Shopping for clothes and other household items is much, much easier. Even though, in the old days, women could outfit the kids by sending mail orders to Spiegel or Sears, it's much easier today to find almost everything you need on line. (By the way, please use The Althouse Amazon Portal.) The clothes are also, as noted, much cheaper, and almost never in need of ironing. Clothes for children (and adults) are much more casual today and much easier to assemble into appropriate outfits and keep clean and presentable. (We did not wear T- and sweat-shirts and jeans to school in the 1960s.)

3. Let's talk about sex. Both partners — whether they're the single-earner or not — should be saying both "I want a partner who is sensitive to my sexual needs" and "I want a partner who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it." Was the author of the essay saying she'd prefer to have a sexual partner whose consent is a nonissue, who feels obligated to perform whenever called upon and only when called upon? Is she saying, I want a "wife" because I want to be the one who gets to sexually control the other person?

4. The answer to the questions at #3 is probably no. The author is satirizing very selfish men to show how bad unequal roles can be. She doesn't explore the potential for a good division of labor in a single-earner household. I'm not saying she should have had to do that. It's a short, humorous, very memorable essay. But it does manipulate readers to think, I'd better have a career of my own and get out of the home, or I'm an easy victim.

"My mother was a judge, and I can tell you why I decided not to be a working mother..."

"... as a child I adored the stay-at-home and ethnic mothers of friends, women who were warm and welcoming and had time for me. As I got older I watched my mother work long hours and become burned out. My mother gave me many worthwhile things, including money, an education, and her curiosity. Yet as much I love and admire her, I wanted a different life. I wanted more time for myself; I wanted a warm home, filled with people and cooking and laughter."

This is the third-highest-voted comment on a NYT op-ed titled "The Best Era for Working Women Was 20 Years Ago." The comment continues:

Of course, there are burdens with my choice and trade-offs, as there are with all choices. Yet, many women in my social milieu have made similar choices. Our mothers had huge careers in the nineties, and we are stay-at-home parents. Some of my friends have deep problems with their mothers -- feeling they didn't get enough attention; feeling their mothers were selfish or hard or power-hungry, or all of those things.

I would rather see a world where people had more time for everything they love -- whether family or hobbies or art -- than see a world where more people are encouraged to increase the economy. Maybe fewer women in the workforce is actually a good thing. Maybe fewer men might be, too. We have only one life; hopefully we can both enjoy it and do something good with it -- not just work for money all the time.

By the way, the author of the op-ed, Bryce Covert (a woman), defines "best" completely in terms of the percentage of women who are in the workplace. 20 years ago, it was 60, and now it's only 57. We see that on a graph titled "Women in Retreat." But the same graph also shows: 1. Men were at 75% 20 years ago and 69% now, and 2. From 1950 to today, women's percentage has risen from 32% to 57% and men's percentage has fallen from 87% to 69%. Covert says:

We’ve spent a lot of time worrying about American men. Their labor force participation trend line has looked like a tumble down the side of a hill since the late 1950s. But all of this time, men have always worked at higher rates than women.

Covert presumes that what's "best" would be equal percentages of women and men out in the labor market. But what are the men and women who are not in the workplace doing? Let's say the numbers were equal and 25% of working-age males and females were not participants in the labor market. It would be hard to say what these people were doing with their time. They're not all going to be the warm and welcoming stay-at-home parents the comment-writer loves, and gender inequity within this group is much more likely and much more of a problem.

I don't think getting more people into the workforce is the ideal. I'd like to see people using their time on earth to do things that are constructive and beneficial. There are many possibilities, including the obvious one, caring for your own children, and the similar but less well-respected one, taking care of a household that is also lived in by another adult who is putting time into working for the household's money or by another adult who is disabled or elderly.

We should respect some of the working-age adults who stay out of the labor market, but others will be regarded as idlers (not to mention criminals). It's much harder for men to feel respected when they devote themselves to constructive, beneficial nonpaying work. I don't see much attention to changing that, so it's a more attractive option for women. Yet people like Covert would portray the option as unattractive for women too. That's perverse.

(And, yes, I know Labor Day was yesterday, and the article was basically the NYT's effort to get something Labor-Day-related on the front page. But I was interested in complaining about the perverse notion of what's "best.")

"The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood."

"It is logical for couples to decide that the person who earns less, usually a woman, does more of the household chores and child care, [economist Sari] Kerr said. But it’s also a reason women earn less in the first place. 'That reinforces the pay gap in the labor market, and we’re trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle,' she said. Some women work less once they have children, but many don’t, and employers pay them less, too... Employers, especially for jobs that require a college degree, pay people disproportionately more for working long hours and disproportionately less for working flexibly. To achieve greater pay equality, social scientists say — other than women avoiding marriage and children — changes would have to take place in workplaces and public policy that applied to both men and women. Examples could be companies putting less priority on long hours and face time, and the government providing subsidized child care and moderate-length parental leave."

From a NYT column by Claire Cain Miller.

I know a lot of you are about to say that the gender gap is actually not real. I'm not trying to weigh in on either side of that debate. But I'd like to encourage you — on this Mother's Day Eve — to focus on because of motherhood. If the gap is real, and if it is because of motherhood, then what? 

Virtually nothing is as important to society as childbearing and childrearing, and yet the individuals who make this contribution are not economically rewarded but disadvantaged. We may complacently think enough individuals will find personal rewards and shoulder the disadvantages, so we'll get the next generation we need, but that's not assured. And even if it were, why is it what we want? Why should things be set up for the advantage of people who work long and hard at their jobs and avoid the burdens of childbearing and childrearing?

Let's talk about natalism.

"What if All I Want is a Mediocre Life?"/"What if I all I want is a small, slow, simple life?"

Now, there's some headline to first line slippage.

The headline is good clickbait, but it sets up an argument that the author — Krista O'Reilly Davi-Digui — never makes. What's mediocre about a small, slow, simple life? Many people would say that the life described in the essay is the essential, most beautiful human life, centered on the real, immediate world of home and family.

The word "mediocre" does appear in the essay, but only to describe relatively unimportant aspects of the small, slow, simple life. Her body is mediocre. She might be a "mediocre home manager" in that she "rarely dusts," sometimes orders pizza, and has some messy "areas" in her house.

"It’s this notion of this growing equality between husbands and wives having this paradoxical effect of growing inequality across households."

Said University of Wisconsin sociology professor Christine Schwartz, quoted in a NYT article titled "Marriage Equality Grows, and So Does Class Divide."

The headline confused me at first, because I'm used to the term "marriage equality" referring to same-sex marriage. Here, it means that men these days tend to marry women who work at jobs that are at an equivalent economic level. It's not so much the executive marrying the secretary and the doctor marrying the nurse anymore. Executives marry executives and doctors marry doctors — in opposite-sex marriages (and in same-sex marriages too, I suppose, but that's not what the article is about).

The "class divide" in the headline is prompting us to feel bad about male-female equality in marriage, because it means that in one couple 2 high salaries are added together and the next family is stuck pooling 2 low salaries. In the old system, you could have made 2 middling economic units out of these 4 individuals, and now you've got one rich-getting-richer couple and one poor-getting-poor couple. Whatever happened to the olden days when a man being rich was like a girl being pretty? The rich man found the most beautiful woman and the family income averaged down, more like that next family.

Now, we've got "assortative mating," in which "people marry others they enjoy spending time with, and that tends to be people like themselves."

The top-rated comment is:

Let's stop relying on "non-assortative" mating as a protection against inequality, and start encouraging women and men to seek financial independence instead. This means things like fair wage laws, better support of workers, reasonable childcare policies, parental leave for women and men, and even earlier down the road, more emphasis on education and employable skills. The days of Marriage as Career Path are declining fast and in my humble opinion, that's a very good thing.

I still see potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low. If 2 individuals marry because they are a lot alike and enjoy spending time together, should they not maximize their time? All this frenetic 2-career activity, complicated by children who must be shuttled about to childcare, with evenings soaked up in housework — why are we living like that?

Here, please read this: "The Scold/Mr. Money Mustache’s retirement (sort of) plan." Why not put all your effort into making what you need and preserving it, with frugality, and reveling in the time of your life?

Mr. Money Mustache is the alias of a forty-one-year-old Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who made or, more to the point, saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty. We’re not talking millions. More like tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, which he and his wife diligently salted away at a time of life when most people are piling on debt and living beyond their means. He calculated a way to make these early paychecks last using a strategy of sensible investment and a rigorous, idiosyncratic, but relatively agreeable frugality.

He is, by his own reckoning, a wealthy man, without want, but he and his wife, who have one child, spend an average of just twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Adeney is a kind of human optimization machine, the quintessence of that urge, which is stronger in some of us than in others, to elevate principle over appetite, and to seek out better, cheaper ways of doing things. He presents thrift as liberation rather than as deprivation. Living a certain way is his life’s work. “I’ve become irrationally dedicated to rational living,” he says.

The "time gap" between men and women — the difference in the amount of time spent on unpaid work.

I'm reading a NYT "Gender Gap" article titled "How Society Pays When Women’s Work Is Unpaid."

Men spend more time working for money. Women do the bulk of the unpaid work — cooking, cleaning and child care. This unpaid work is essential for households and societies to function. But it is also valued less than paid work, and when it is women’s responsibility, it prevents them from doing other things.

Now, why, exactly is this a problem? Everything anybody does prevents them from doing other things. What is wrong with a division of labor within the family with one adult concentrating on bringing in money (for the family to use to buy various things for its benefit) and the other adult specializing in the accomplishment of tasks for the direct benefit of the family (avoiding the cost of paying for someone else to do that work)?

The author, Claire Cain Miller, suggests that what's wrong is that people don't value the in-kind contribution made by the nonincome-earner and that women tend to be the ones in that role. Those 2 factors are related. Women may be stuck in a role because it's given low value and a role may be regarded as having less value because it is what women do. That doesn't mean the solution is to transform more single-earner families into 2-earner families and for them to pay outsiders to do more services. It's at least conceivable that a solution would be to encourage a more positive attitude toward household labor and to get beyond the presumption that it's women's work. In some families, the woman can do better going out and getting the income and the man can do better with the household tasks.

But here's the propaganda we're getting:

“This is one of those root inequalities that exist all over in society and we just don’t talk about it very much,” Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Gates Foundation, said in an interview. She said she was inspired by her own observations when traveling to other countries as well as by time-use data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “If we don’t bring it forward, we basically won’t unlock the potential of women.”

The "time-use data" shows women spending a lot more time on unpaid tasks than men. The data is presented to display a startling "time gap," but if men are putting a lot more time into paid work, the problem isn't what it's made out to be. And perhaps more importantly, time isn't necessarily the best measure of work, especially where one of the main unpaid chores is "child care." Much of the time you spend with your children is leisurely and pleasurable — immensely rewarding. If I'm reading a book while a youngster plays with toys nearby, do I get time credit for that?

In fact, one of the best things about home-based unpaid work is that you're not on a time clock, you're not translating every task into a dollar value. When the income-earning spouse contributes some unpaid housework, it might be distorted to look at the time. If much of the wife's work is child care, but the man's work is home repair, it's not an even trade off. If you were making a deal with your spouse and one person was going to look after a child for X hours and the other was going to do yard work and caulk windows and clean the garage for Y hours, a fair deal wouldn't be X = Y.

Cultural change is also important, Ms. Gates said.

She recalled being unhappy about the long commute to her oldest daughter’s preschool. Mr. Gates, then chief executive of Microsoft, said he would drive their daughter two days a week.

“Moms started going home and saying to their husbands, ‘If Bill Gates can drive his daughter, you better darn well drive our daughter or son,’ ” Ms. Gates said. “If you’re going to get behavior change, you have to role-model it publicly.”

Good thing we have Melinda Gates around to see the unfairness in the world and tell us how to fix it. By the way, Bill and Melinda, some people would value the time spent in the car with a daughter. And don't you people have a driver? I'm sure there's some woman home with her kids who could do with a paid job driving your car. Why are you two bickering over a chore you have the money to pay people to do?

Is the NYT just basically reprinting PR from Bill and Melinda Gates? Do we really want their unfiltered advice on how to understand and fix the world's problems?

ADDED: Good lord! There's another Gates PR piece in the NYT today: "Bill Gates’s Clean-Energy Moon Shot."

Check out the highest-rated comment on this WaPo column, "The American Dream? I thought so, until I had a baby and no maternity leave."

"Just another first world, entitled diatribe. What??? You had to cut cable and drive an older car and only eat out once a week? The horrors!!! It sure is terrible that we live in a country where you couldn't get months of taxpayer funded maternity leave to be with a child you chose to have while still eating out, watching HBO, and buying a new car."

The author of the column is Carrie Visintainer, who is identified as the author of a book makes the commenter seem all the more right: "Wild Mama: One Woman’s Quest to Live Her Best Life, Escape Traditional Parenthood, and Travel the World."

Funny, just this morning, we were talking about how nobody says "live your best life" anymore. Ah, and suddenly I remember that I only just learned that phrase a couple months ago when everyone was talking about the pizza rat. At the time, I said:

Would you have had the presence of mind not just to photograph a sudden encounter of a beast at his best, but to speak to him, to speak words of wisdom?

Ah, but "Live your best life" seems to be an entire franchise of pop culture wisdom. I'm a little sad to see that. It seems to be Oprah-connected in ways I am not willing to explore....

"She talks about not knowing who she is anymore because she’s just Mom . . . and then she goes and buys a 12-passenger van so she can do more carpooling for her kids’ activities."

"It’s kinda heartbreaking. Her complaints aren’t incessant, but when they do happen, it’s very clear that I’m watching stuffed-away feelings leak out — like she just can’t keep up appearances anymore."

From a question for the WaPo advice columnist Carolyn Hax, who gives what I think is an excellent answer (which includes something close to that rule of thumb of mine: the best test of what people really want to do is what they are actually doing).